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Troubleshooting network problems can be a very difficult and challenging task. While most IT engineers use a network analyzer to help solve network problems, whenanalyzing hundreds or thousands of packets, it can become very hard to locate and further research conversations between hosts. Colasoft’s Capsa v8 now introduces a new feature that allows us to highlight-colorize relevant IP conversations in the network based on their MAC address, IP Addresses, TCP or UDP conversations.

This great new feature will allow IT engineers to quickly find the related packets of the conversations they want to analyze emphatically, using just a few clicks.

As shown in the screenshot below, users can colorize any Conversation in the MAC Conversation View, IP Conversation View, TCP Conversation View and UDP Conversation View. Packets related to that Conversation will be colorized automatically with the same color.

Take TCP conversation for example, choose one conversation, right-click it and choose “Select Conversation Color” in the pop-up menu:

Figure 1. Selecting a Conversation Color in Capsa v8.0

Next, select the color you wish to use to highlight the specific conversation:

Figure 2. Selecting a color

Once the color has been selected, Capsa will automatically find and highlight all related packets of this conversation using the same background color:

Network traffic is data in a network. In computer networks, the data is encapsulated in packets. So network traffic monitoring is to capture all the packets going down the network. Sometimes, it will be very useful to check your network activity. When Windows 7 network is very slow, internet browsing is very slow, connection problems and high network activity occurs when you do nothing, you will find this really helpful. The purpose of this article is to help you understand how to monitor network traffic in windows 7 with Capsa network analyzer.

If we want to have a graphical view of the statistics or get a trend chart of the network traffic, then we can use the graphs in the Dashboard tab. It provides a great many of statistic graphs from global network to a specific node. You are able to as well create almost any kind of graph based on any MAC address, IP address and protocol, etc. With these graphs, you can easily find out anomalies of the network and get useful statistics.

The Summary tab provides general information of the entire network or the selected node in the Node Explorer window. In the Summary tab we can get a quick view of the total traffic, real-time traffic, broadcast traffic, multicast traffic and so on. When we switch among the node in the Node Explorer window, corresponding traffic information will be provided.

In these two endpoint tabs (Physical Endpoint and IP Endpoint), we can monitor network traffic information of each physical address node and IP address node, both local and remote. With their easy sorting feature we can easily find out the nodes with abnormal traffic, such as which hosts are generating or have generated the largest traffic.

The Protocol tab lists all protocols applied in your network transmission. In the Protocol tab we can monitor network traffic by each protocol. By analyzing the protocols in the network traffic, we can easily understand what applications are consuming the network bandwidth, for example, the HTTP stands for website browsing, and the POP3 stands for email, etc.

The Matrix tab visualizes all network connections and traffic details in one single graph. The weight of the lines between the nodes indicates the traffic volume and the color indicates the status. As we move the cursor on a specific node, network traffic details of the node will be provided.

These are the very basic methods of monitoring network traffic in windows 7 with Capsa network analyzer, there are lot of advanced functions available on Capsa Network Analyzer 7 .

Share your experience with this tool and any new findings on this is welcomed.